Condiciones de vida:

This final Section of the questionnaire covered a diverse range of subject matters, where it was hoped more of the individual personality of respondents would come through from their responses. In total nine sub-dived questions were asked in this Section, offering potentially twenty-one different answers. Mindful of the importance of self-identity, and self-identification, but also commonality, the first five question in this Section asked students to list their three favoured leisure activities, their three favourite TV programmes, their three favoured television channels, their three favoured musical artists and what they are most likely to shop for. Quite obviously these questions are themed at exposing more of who the young person is whilst also highlighting what is popularly shared across the sample.

The following question asked the student if they would like their school to encourage the teaching of non-Irish culture in their school. Obviously with the questions regarding social inclusion/exclusion and social avoidance/acceptance in Section 2: Friendship Networks a question such as this - questioning support for the encouragement or opposition of

multiculturalism in formal educational - might potentially point towards how comfortable some young people may have been regarding multiculturalism. The next two questions would probe the future projections of young people themselves. Given the dominant role that education and careerism play in the discourse around young people in Ireland - particularly young middle class people - the following four questions concentrated on investigating how people may locate their own personal future educational and career paths. The respondent was asked to indicate if after secondary school they would continue with further education and what mode this education would take - University, Institute of Technology, FAS course/training programme, Other training

programme (such as army, Aer Lingus) or If Other please explain. Because of the popularity of

post-secondary education students were asked if they were not pursuing further education why? It was hoped questions such as these might bring more of the individual out in their responses, as with the following question that asked what the preferable career path was. Obviously the visions of young people can be moderated by socialisation so allowing young people to express the area of employment they could see themselves in and the reasons for this was considered to again allow the individuality of the respondent to come through.

The next question addressed an area that can often be considered as a highly emotional matter for young people; identification of a possible role model and why the young person would choose this particular person as a role model. The question itself stated:

It is often said that young people need positive role models; people whom they look up to, whose achievements provide inspiration for others. Who do you consider a role model and why?

Role models can of course be representative of different things, but again the question can be seen as themed towards bringing out more of the respondent‟s personality and values, as can the penultimate question asking young people what thing they would change „about Irish society‟ if they were given the power. This question was open to a vast variety of responses, from very individual concerns to matters that would radically change Irish society. The intention behind this question was to investigate how young people might project Irish society to be - what their

individual projections may imply for Irish society - into the future. We have seen how Miller saw

The Nation as Extended in history however it can be seen that the idea of the Nation can be

Directly asking young people the type of changes they would make in contemporary Ireland can indicate what type of future Ireland young Irish people may want to live in.

The final question on the questionnaire offered the respondent the opportunity to address their own valuation, if any, of Irish identity, asking:

Having just completed the questionnaire is there anything now that you think is important in showing Irishness and why?

Keeping with the approach that suggests that identification is uneven it was expected that such a question would offer a wide variety of replies that may specify what some young people believe

being Irish is.

It is hopefully appreciated from the above breakdown of the questionnaire that the questionnaire was themed at helping survey and illuminate the general and specific areas and issues of both self and collective identity for the young people involved in this research. As the area under investigation involves a diversity of personalised viewpoints it was felt that a mixture of fixed and open questions offered both a means of generalising young peoples‟ views towards Irishness while also attempting to capture how individual young people may engage with their own and with others‟ sense of Irishness; what Irishness may mean, how it may be constituted and

how it might be operationalised. Almost 150 different variables were constructed to help

illuminate identity and the following section will consider how questionnaire data was treated.